Review of [The] Jew Süss, July 30 1929 (his first piece in the Guardian)

The end of the fourth scene will doubtless be stored by connoisseurs as a collector's piece. It is in this scene that a small but beautiful performance lifts the play clean out of melodrama and touches a truth which is not only of the theatre. Miss Peggy Ashcroft, resisting every temptation to be coy, has the courage to play Naomi with the strictest integrity. Her implied passion for purity is consequently genuinely moving.

Trial of Alger Hiss, June 1 1949

The trial will be haunted at every turn by the great political issue that bedevils the conscience and well-being of every responsible citizen of a democratic country. Has a democrat the right to be a communist and to keep his job and a good opinion of society?

Across the square in which Mr Hiss will be tried, the trial of 11 communist leaders goes on to try to establish for the first time a court test of whether a communist is ipso facto a man dedicated to overthrow by force the government of this country. In the public mind the two trials set up a riptide in the ocean of fear and distrust that washes across all American discussion of communism. It is the sense of this embroilment in a conflict of belief that is happening to lesser men now suspect in their fields of scholarship or government, and the degree of mystery that surrounds the personal relationship of two brilliant young men, that has made this trial fascinating to people uninterested in the legal issue and made it read so far like an unwritten novel by Arthur Koestler.

The civil liberties struggle, June 7 1950 The supreme court of the United States handed down yesterday a decision on race relations as historic as anything since the famous case of Dred Scott versus Sanford, which was - among other things - one of the causes of the civil war. In its last decision of the spring term, the supreme court held that the segregation of Negro students in white universities, and of Negroes in railway dining-cars, is unconstitutional in that it denies Negroes the "equal protection of the law" due to all citizens of the United States and guaranteed to them in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which in 1868 proclaimed the citizenship of Negroes, by defining citizens as "all persons born or naturalised in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof ..."

Some states have already given notice that they will defy the court's ruling and seek a rhetorical and more acceptable interpretation of the 'separate but equal' doctrine. Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia announced in Atlanta yesterday: "As long as I am your governor, Negroes will not be admitted to white schools." In the end, Talmadge and his like will lose. But between the opening of the floodgates of new test cases and the peaceable end of segregation, the old South might well make a final and bloody stand.

Hemingway's Pulitzer prize, May 6 1953

Ernest Hemingway, who has been a major novelist for a quarter of a century and, with Faulkner, the dominant American influence on European writing, yesterday won his first big prize from his native land, which in the arts at any rate annually offers more prizes than the Iowa state fair. Mr Hemingway was declared top boy by the trustees of Columbia University after a lunch at which they confirmed the awards of the Pulitzer prizes.

From A Farewell to Arms to Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway has been assuring his public that he was working up to his still undelivered masterpiece. Last year he threw them a sop in the shape of a short novel, or a long short story, The Old Man and the Sea, about an old fisherman and his last unsuccessful attempt to land a big fish. The scene was set in Cuba, where Mr Hemingway has lived for a decade, and the Cuban government decorated him for finding a moral hero among its beachcombers.

For once Hemingway's American and European critics forewent the pleasures of a snarling match over the merits of his latest novel. Ever since Green Hills of Africa, it has been the privilege of British critics especially to lament Hemingway's tendency to equate virility with weightlifting. And it has been the pride of America to retort that Hemingway was getting strong in every way.

The Old Man and the Sea, however, achieved the unique distinction of enchanting Life magazine and Cyril Connolly at the same time.

Death of Humphrey Bogart, January 16 1957

This was his most famous self: the two-faced cynic, who robbed the banker and the gangster with equal grace, who was sometimes a heel and sometimes a big-city stand-in for the US cavalry, but who was always the derisive foe of the law in its official forms. And this character was suddenly precious in the age of violence; for it satisfied a rather desperate need of the engulfed ordinary man.

When Hitler was acting out scripts more brutal and obscene than anything dreamed of by Chicago or the Warner Brothers, Bogart was the only possible idealist likely to outwit him and survive. No Ronald Colman, Leslie Howard, or other handsome Boy Scout, but a conniver as subtle as Goebbels, a very tough gent who in the end was on our side. The enjoyment of this character from Glasgow to Singapore was assured by the supporting artistic fact that here was a universal type of our rebellious age but one that never appeared in life quite so perfect: never quite so detached in its malice, so inured to corruption, so self-assured in its social stance before the diffident, the pompous and the evil.

Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) vs Sonny Liston, February 27 1964

Cassius Marcellus Clay, by his own admission the greatest man in the history of the human race, could not have surprised the world more if last night God had parted the skies and ridden down on a thunderbolt to present him in person with the title of heavyweight champion of the world.

At five past 11 last night, he (Cassius, not God) stood before the cowering press with his long, long arms raised in a great V, like Moses or Hitler. Below him, in every sense of the word, were at least 46 boxing experts.

They had been culled from Tokyo, Zurich, Stockholm, San Francisco and Glasgow, among other sophisticated places, and 43 of them were ready to form a club, if it would have helped, to stop the fight before it began, so that Liston the Invincible might not have a capital charge on his hands, so that Cassius Clay, the insufferable young blabbermouth from Louisville, Kentucky, might be safely returned to the Blue Grass country and put out to pasture with the other mindless colts.

There was little enmity and no pride of knowledge in this expert group. They had come a long way to report an obscenity: the deliberate mismatching of a 22-year-old grasshopper with an armadillo, of a butterfly with an elephant, of a maniacal youngster with a brutal pro. It had all been done for vast amounts of money. It would be over in one round or two, three at the most, so that up to a minute or so before the two appeared, the 43 consoled each other with forlorn little jokes: "The Miami Beach police department will take Cassius into protective custody at the sound of the bell."

Now he stood over them, his eyes flaring like gas jets and foam at his mouth. "Hypocrites!" he yelled. "Whatcha gonna say now? Huh? Huh? It won't last one round. He'll be out in two. You know somep'n? Nobody but a fool would wanna fight me. I'm too fast. Liston's a powerful man, and I just chopped him up. He couldn't even hurt me. He was so bad he had to go to the hospital, and I'm still pretty. How about that, huh? Whatcha gonna say now? What about you newspapermen? Let's hear it: who's the greatest?"

Death of Walt Disney, December 16 1966

[Walt Disney's father] took in an inflammatory weekly called The Appeal to Reason. Its appeal to the young Disney was a regular front-page cartoon always showing a fat capitalist and an honest working man. The boy had their likenesses down cold after several issues and was admired in the family as an upcoming artist. He was so regarded by the local barber, who encouraged him to exchange a cartoon for a free haircut.

He was the first cartoon millionaire of the film industry. There poured out of his studio skeleton dances and Silly Symphonies and the noisy adventures of Pluto, Donald Duck and the rest of the irascible family. So long as he cherished his outrageous ducks and mice and wolves, he was the darling of the intelligentsia. For his prodigal output, he was rewarded with more than 120 foreign and domestic decorations and honorary degrees. His epitaph must be not unlike that bestowed by Chesterton on Dickens: "The critics blushed but the people wept and cheered."

Death of Dorothy Parker, June 9 1967

Dorothy Parker, a combination Madame de Sévigny, Mary McCarthy and Lauren Bacall of her day, has died at the age of 73. She was the daughter of a comfortable New Jerseyite and followed the most conventional sort of education, through a ladies' seminary into a convent. There is no record that she erupted into any early blasphemies, though she admitted later that all she learned from the cloister was that "I hate my legs. I hate my hands, I shudder at the thought of men, I'm due to fall in love again."

Her off-duty wit snaked through the town, till there was a time when every good line of her cronies was ascribed to her. But nobody ever claimed to copy the wry and pathetic poems of her prime: "Why is it no one sent me yet a perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it's just my luck to get one perfect rose." Her cables to friends were as famous as her stiletto disposal of the famous. To a girl engaged for seven years who finally took the plunge: "Congratulations: what's new?"

Assassination of Robert Kennedy, June 6 1968

[Kennedy] tumbled down from the rostrum with his aides and bodyguards about him. He would be with us in 20 seconds, half a minute at most. We watched the swinging doors of the kitchen. Over the gabble of the television there was suddenly from the direction of the kitchen a crackle of sharp sounds. Like a balloon popping.

An exploded flash bulb maybe, more like a man banging a tray several times against a wall. A half-dozen or so of us trotted to the kitchen door and at that moment time and life collapsed. Kennedy and his aides had been coming on through the pantry. It was now seen to be not a kitchen but a regular serving pantry with great long tables and racks of plates against the wall.

He was smiling and shaking hands with a waiter, then a chef in a high white hat. Lots of Negroes, naturally, and they were glowing with pride, for he was their man. Then those sounds from somewhere from a press of people on or near a steam table. And before you could synchronise your sight and thought, Kennedy was a prone bundle on the greasy floor and two or three others had gone down with him. There was an explosion of shouts and screams and the high moaning cries of mini-skirted girls.

The doors of the pantry swung back and forth and we would peek in on the obscene disorder and reel back again to sit down, then to glare in a stupefied way at the nearest friend, to steady one boorish woman with black-rimmed eyes who was pounding a table and screaming, "Goddamned stinking country!" The fat girl was babbling faintly like a baby, like someone in a motor accident.

Out in the chaos of the ballroom, Kennedy's brother-in-law was begging for doctors. And back in the pantry they were howling for doctors. It was hard to see who had been badly hit. One face was streaming with blood. It was that of Paul Schrade, a high union official, and it came out that he got off lightly.

Then all the "facts" were fired or intoned from the screen. Roosevelt Grier, a 300lb coloured football man, had grabbed the man with the gun and overwhelmed him. A Kennedy bodyguard had taken the gun, a .22-calibre. The maniac had fired straight at Kennedy and sprayed the other bullets around the narrow pantry. Kennedy was now at the receiving hospital and soon transferred to the Good Samaritan. Three neurologists were on their way. He had been hit in the hip, perhaps, but surely in the shoulder and "the mastoid area". There was the first sinister note about a bullet in the brain. In the timeless nausea and dumb disbelief we stood and sat and stood again and sighed at each other and went into the pantry again and looked at the rack of plates and the smears of blood on the floor and the furious guards and the jumping-jack photographers.

It was too much to take. The only thing to do was to touch the shoulder of the Kennedy man who had let you in and get out on to the street and drive home to the top of the silent Santa Monica Hills, where pandemonium is rebroadcast in tranquillity and where a little unshaven guy amok in a pantry is slowly brought into focus as a bleak and shoddy villain of history.

The My Lai massacre, December 15 1969

There has been nothing in the memory of living Americans like the massacre of My Lai. They cannot stay for ever in the pit of horror. They must climb out of it and find an indecent scape-goat or some bearable explanation that can restore their self-respect. For the nightly TV interviews with ordinary people show how pitifully the people feel that their youth is on trial. Now, from Saigon, comes a brave bit of analysis from William F Buckley, the brilliant conservative columnist who for once does not feel obliged to snatch a rightwing argument and give it maximum plausibility.

He faces the progressively grim alternatives by asking how many people were guilty, because an aberration must have limits. "Jack the Ripper was not a corporation, so that we can think of him as aberrant," which we cannot do about "the Nazis under Hitler or the communists under Stalin". But if 10, 20, 50 men "concerted in the act of genocide", then we must ask why "a cross-section of young America found itself capable of utterly barbaric behaviour".

The "preferable" explanation is that "the guilty company relapsed into a kind of catatonic frenzy". The second, "the horrifying" alternative, is that "America in AD 1969 has bred young Americans who can insouciantly murder grandmothers and little children."